Travel

July 12, 2015

My mother told me years back that things are better nowadays than in the past.

Though I reckon she was thinking of the bad-tempered draught-horses that scared her as a little girl, her words have bucked me up through the trouble I’ve seen so far. Besides, I can’t remember a moment when that woman has been straightforward about what concerned herself. There seem to have been things in the worse old days that disturbed her little-girl self even more than her Dad’s horses.

I’m maybe meeting Karine for lunch, I believe, unless she can’t.

It’s already late morning, so I’ll walk both toward possible lunch and the office. Up, then, down, the rue de Belleville.

Karine has the strongest, most competent and loveliest woman-hands in the world. No woman under 50 can have hands like hers. Just in front of me: a very patient mother taking her good-humored 8 or 9-year old to school. She’s trailing her long-fingered unadorned right hand to feel the special smoothness of a worn metal fence-rail – nice, sure but some beauty can only be acquired by aging.

Looking away, right: concrete public housing. All oblique walls, water stains & grey dust & business-like businesses on the ground floors. Everybody here is living off the side-effects of life as it’s organized today: medical services & fluid analyses, computer-repair and copies, nicotine injectors, unblocked cell-phones. There’s a little communal garden at the south-west corner, on rue Haxo, I think it is.

A big hand-painted sign, now part-hidden by bushy roses tremière, reads “Nous sommes tous Charlie” – “We are all Charlie”. “We all” underlines Charlie’s inclusive nature, I guess, for the middle-aged, white French women who keep this garden going for this heavily-immigrant neighborhood. The fact is, all over the world les femmes d’un certain âge, white or not, keep the sweet things of ordinary life going. I bet a lot of them have hands almost as lovely and skillful as Karine’s.

Charlie. To the astonishment of the world, Woodstock brought together a half million young people to have fun & listen to music & nothing but fun and music.

“Je suis Charlie” brought together almost three million men, women & children to show publicly their belief that Liberté, Egalité, Solidarité are universal values. To my knowledge, this has never been done in such a straightforward way in such circumstances & spontaneously. And no-one was even sick.

And, as far as I know, never in the checkered history of this lovely country have political murderers provoked so little fulmination against the friends, families and presumed ethnicity & religious orientation of the murderers. Fulmination ranging from the truly venomous to unintended comical being something people here will do against their political and cultural enemies. Viz., Charlie Hebdo.

And then, too, Charlie were a mass of self-organized people standing up for right, not against wrong.

“My golly,” a woman spoke to me as I shuffled there in the crowd. Quite bon ton, bon genre, she is, but old and twinkly-eyed enough to have picked up a cobblestones or two in ‘69.

“It’s so strange to smile at the police,” she says, “I can hardly believe it’s me.” Well, it won’t do to encourage them too much, I reply. “Of course not,” she says, rather primly. “But in spite of everything, Monsieur, we are all Charlie. So there you are.”

I weep as I think of this.

I’ve come to the intersection of rue des Pyrénées & de Belleville.

Go to the office? Bet that she calls me?

If I go straight on down the rue de Belleville and she doesn’t call, I can always have a coffee, even lunch. Yes?

Yes, thank god. Nobody’s got me in a position that if I don’t go into work I’ll be sleeping out of doors.

It’s a spectacular view of the Eiffel tower from up here. Below the sky-line, kebabs compete with Asian delicacies and brasserie fare & organic chic.

I step into to the view. It disappears. On the left, the house where Edith Piaf was born.

Here is what the plaque to her memory says: “On these steps was born Edith Piaf in the most terrible poverty.”

Her respectable biographers don’t believe it. I do.

Because of my mother, if you like, because such misery is part of almost all pre-contemporary literature even if they’ve never noticed it. After all, until I read a squib about it in some newspaper not too terribly long ago, it never occurred to me that in the Slave South there was – Christ on a kebab! – a perfectly legal, perfectly necessary “slave correction industry”. Sweet Old Dixie was well spiced with artisanal torture & murder businesses! A fact, like those nine million bicycles in Beijing.

In Edith Piaf’s day, of course, and in my Grandad’s too, it was still universally acknowledged that the shamefulness of most people’s origins was ordinarily rewarded by poverty unless supported by work considered humiliating, as for Dalits or Gypsies today.

Lucky for Edith Piaf, her grandmother was madam of a brothel and could feed & care for her properly in those crucial first years, which neither her mother, a street singer, nor her father, a circus performer then serving in the Great War trenches, could do. Mon dieu, a family of mountebanks!

Karine texts “I’m free”.

We agree to meet at the bottom of the hill, at the statue of “la Grisette”.

I hurry, fly along.

“Grisette” meant/means “a seductive working girl, often with a connotation of prostitution”.

You’ll find Grisette’s phantom in almost every French popular novel until she disappears into the memory- hole: better work opportunities & social protection & so on towards the beginning of the 20th century.

Grisette’s disappearance was lamented, by the way, notably by an early socialist – “Damme, Dominique. These whores cost a fortune! In my day we could have them for half the price! Better looking & better service, too!” Hence, the nice statue, ordered by the state for the 1909 Salon.

By then, respectable people have stopped alluding to the casual sexual exploitation of young women as any more serious than the witterings of weak minds - just like, say, government institutions, the Catholic Church or the Boy Scouts talked of allegations of systemic child rape.

I wonder why does that happen?

But enough of that.

“Karine, “ I call, trotting now, “Seeing you is to love you!”

Tracy Danison lives and works in Paris. You can find out more about his Paris walks here.

July 06, 2015

I’m writing this blog post from a hotel room in Maine. Through my window, there’s a triangle of white-shingled roof with a seabird perched on it, staring at me as if to say, “Why are you inside? It’s sunny out. Look at the ocean!”

And I am looking at the ocean. It’s bright blue and white-capped and my friends are on the beach playing frisbee and reading and napping. Part of me wants to join them, but in truth right now I’m happier inside writing. All my vacations also include—by choice—working.

This is why some of my best vacations over the past few years have been artists’ residencies. The first and most obvious thing residencies have going for them is that they’re often free or at least partially-funded; frequently they also give you a stipend. And residencies also take care of the logistics of daily life for you. They house you. They feed you. And for the compulsively social (among whom I count myself), you have a whole new group of people to befriend.

The social atmosphere is my downfall. I embark on each residency determined to be a writing machine. I imagine myself suddenly turned medieval monk: staying up all night writing until the inkwell I dip my quill in runs dry and the candle gutters out. I vow to write for at least 10 hours each day, returning home with hundreds of new pages.

This vow generally lasts less than a day.

While I observe with wonder those who get up before dawn to clock hours in the studio, I’m more prone to sleeping in and then wandering into the common space for coffee and hours of conversation. If there’s an event, I’ll go to it. Then I’ll see who wants to have lunch. It’s usually not until the post-prandial hours when I finally sit down to write.

Despite how much I fetishize the immersive work experience of residencies, what I’ve found is that they have taught me much more about the barriers I erect between myself and my writing than they’ve been havens of productivity. Whether I’m in New York or cloistered away in some far-flung region, I easily find reasons to wander away from my desk.

On my last residency, the BAU Institute’s fellowship in Otranto, I revised two nonfiction pieces, wrote a poem, and took notes for an new essay project—for two weeks with limited Internet access and few outside commitments, this is a pretty meager output. On the other hand, I made friends with some wonderful people, learned about the sorcery tradition in Puglia (to curse someone, pierce a lemon with needles and hide it in a cistern), marveled at frescos and mosaics, and swam in the Adriatic almost every day.

Near the end of the residency I texted my friend Diana, bewailing how little I’d gotten done.

Diana’s response? “Does anyone ever get any work done at residencies?”

It was comforting since she’d just spent a month at a residency in Mexico and so hopefully was speaking from personal experience, but her words were probably more for rhetorical effect than accurate since she still kept up with writing her regular New York Times column while she was gone. And our friend Shelly remains deeply grateful for her time at MacDowell, crediting it for giving her the space she needed to complete her first book. The truth is: my failure with residencies shows the same flaw I have in my daily life in New York—a text pings and I’m lured out the door by friends or an email shows up from one of the co-editors at my press or a student, and I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of responding rather then focusing on my manuscript.

Being in a new environment without previously-engrained procrastination patterns can help you recognize your excuses: how often we might use other work or people as evasion. Most of us are juggling at least one other job (often two or three) in addition to writing, so it’s easy to prioritize the ones with the guaranteed paychecks over sitting down at your desk in hopes you’ll type out something some editor somewhere will write you a check for. And we all want to spend time with our loved ones. In many ways, residencies are similar to the rest of your life: it’s hard to find the right balance between engaging with the world and hiding away in productive solitude as you try to wrestle with the inchoate images and ideas in your head.

Some residencies make this easier than others. The Betsy Hotel hosts only one writer at a time in itsWriter’s Room, allowing you to still feel cloistered while sitting on a roof deck in the middle of South Beach. Residencies at schools such asInterlochen Arts Academy enforce a sort of scheduled discipline since you are also teaching—it’s hard to slack off on your own work when you’re also trying to elicit new poems and stories from talented young students. And, of course, residencies like Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Jentel, and PLAYAgive their artists private workspaces where, since no one ventures over to disturb or distract you, it’s much easier to block out the world and write.

But residencies are also productive in ways that reverberate far beyond how many pages finish while you’re there. Although it’s easy to think productivity is gauged by word count: it’s also just as important to have space to read, to think, to talk to like-minded strangers, to see things you otherwise wouldn’t. Last summer, I went on a two week hiking trip in the remote Westfjords in Iceland as part of amobile artists residency. Because we were backpacking and camping (no Internet! no electricity!), I didn’t bring my laptop and barely wrote a word while I was there, but I clambered over cliffs and slept on lava rocks and moss and heard Arctic foxes chittering near our campsite in Iceland’s bright midnight. These experiences have stayed with me and their memories continue to generate new work. The same is likely to be true of my time at BAU. The clear blue Adriatic, the bright white sea cliffs with their caves, the silver olive groves and the wild fennel growing by the side of the road—all of that rests somewhere inside me now and eventually I’ll find a way to write about it. I wasn’t confessing any real shame about not writing enough to Diana—I just wanted her to offer reassurance, the same way when I’ve asked boyfriends how I look in a certain dress, the only answer I want to hear is “You look fantastic!”

It’s important to carve out time for yourself to write—whether at residencies or at home. But you can’t hide away too long from the world. After all, the world is what we’re writing about.

I’m telling myself this now as I sit here in my hotel room writing a blog post while I’m on vacation. I’m saying it because I believe it. And because I’ve been fielding texts and visits to my hotel room all afternoon from my friends who want to know when I’m coming out to join them. It’s late enough in the day that the tide’s starting to roll back now. The ocean is a perfect denim blue. Seagulls soar and swoop in the distance, their wings like little arches inscribed against the sky. I’ve enjoyed the hours I’ve spent inside thinking about what I want to say to you, but it’s time to turn off the computer and go walk in the sand.

June 19, 2015

I have come to the conclusion that it is quite impossible to sum up all the epiphanies that took place over five days with 80 plus poets from 21 countries.I cannot even begin to name all the dots that were connected, seeds planted, and friendships made. I do know that together, we observed how small gestures move adroitly between grand actions, and how each person's story comes forward into the realm of possibility.We learned that the rhythm, tone, and gesture of words convey their meaning just as much as meaning conveys meaning. Capisce? We learned we have a lot more to do, both apart and together. There is a big world out there that needs the balm of the poet. Andiamo, ragazzi!

I want to offer some very specific thank yous to the following people for making this conference happen: First, to Valeriano Forte, the poet and organizer of 100 Thousand Poets for Change in Salerno, for his generosity of spirit, and for opening Salerno to all of us.

Grazie to the one whose heart was beating like he was at a weddingand to the one who was a native in a strange land.Grazie to the one who secured our apartment and who woke me at 5:45 the last morning to hug me goodbye.Grazie to the one who swept me off to Paestumand the one who gave me tips about Dublin.Grazie to the one who went home to Macedonia to continue the struggle thereand to the one who spoke for the Romaand to the one who spoke for the Yazidiand to the ones who spoke for schoolgirls in India.Grazie to the three angels of Salernoand to the one who exchanged books with meand to the one who admired my hair and gaveme her long poem.Grazie to the one who sang her poems with such force and beautyand to the one who knew Hurry Curry in Venice, CA.Grazie to the one who gave the best bear hugs everand to the ones who admitted being introvertsand to the ones who shared their excellent photographsand to the ones who work with childrenand to the one who knows crowd funding. (Wewill get this going yet.)Grazie to the one who shared her filmsand to the one who led the "Micro-Poems"and to the creator of the paper boats.Grazie to the ones who went with me to the Villa of Mysteries at Pompeiand to the one who went with me days later to see the Book of Kells.Grazie to everyone who danced and to those who bought me something small or largeand to the one who taught me to say “ci vediamo domani.” (see you tomorrow!)Grazie to the one who brought his daughter, who was thirteen and a poetand to ones who sat in the café with me while I remembered my late father and cried.Grazie to the one who is a poet with her cameraand to the one who founded River Styx, the poet laureate of St. Louis.Grazie to my co-emcee at Saturday night’s readingand to the one who shared my sister’s name (spelled only slightly differently)and to the ones with the beautiful smilesand to the creator of Medusa, process person par excellence and limoncello supplier extraordinaire.Grazie to the one who gave me her friendship and half of her sandwichand to all those who shared their hearts. That means EVERYONE.(Note: if you feel I have not given you a specific shout-out here, please be advised I have looked at the list. Know I am thinking of you! Yes, you!)Grazie to those who encouraged me to speak Italian, the language of my maternal grandparents.Most of all, thank you to those who were not able to come,the ones whose visas were denied for one reason or another.We missed you terribly. As we look foward to the next conference,we will plan how to grow this movement so that everyone,everyone who wants to come can do so.We are going to figure this out.Poetry can change the worldone person, one poem,one breath, one heartbeatone gatheringat a time.

Last but not least, thank you, Stacey Harwood for the opportunity to blog at The Best Amercian Poetry this week. It is always a pleasure and I learn something whenever I do it. Best regards to you and David.

April 27, 2015

As all but the most delusional poets know, originality doesn’t really exist. Every writer is beholden to the books he or she has read or the writers whose work he or she admires. That’s the idea behind the “Under the Influence” reading sponsored by The Betsy-South Beach and O, Miami each year during National Poetry Month.

The program originated four years ago. FIU poet Campbell McGrath, O, Miami (and former McGrath student) P. Scott Cunningham, and Daniel Halpern, poet and Ecco Press editor were on hand. Also present via video was Stanley Kunitz, Halpern’s teacher. Kunitz read a poem by Hyam Plutzik, the father of Betsy owner Jonathan Plutzik. Kuniz and Plutzik were contemporaries who knew each other’s work well.

Since that first evening, it’s become an annual collaboration between O, Miami and The Betsy, with Campbell McGrath at the helm.

“I love this event,” McGrath told the capacity audience at The Betsy’s BBar one recent evening. “It never fails to enhance our understanding of the poets who have influenced us.” He opened with another poem by Plutzik, the humorous Drinking Song.

And, because McGrath and the two poets reading with him are also writing professors, the evening demonstrated how influence is received, transmuted, and passed to the next generation of poets. Julie Marie Wade, also an FIU poet, read “A Jazz Fan Looks Back,” by the late African American poet Jayne Cortez. “We’re told to write what you know,” Wade said in connection to the poem, “but it’s better to write about what you love.” She added, “This poem makes me want to learn more about jazz.”

Daisy Fried opened with Frank O’Hara. A visiting writer-in-residence in The Betsy’s Writer's Room (The Betsy is host hotel for O, Miami during Poetry Month), Fried identified O’Hara for younger members of the audience as “a midcentury New York poet.” She lauded him for always “going for the emotion.” She promised that all three of her influence poems -- the poets also read two of their own -- would be about motherhood, though, she cautioned, “not in the way you might expect.”

McGrath lamented the past year as a bad one for poets. Tomas Transtromer, the Nobel Prize-winning Swedish poet died in late March, he noted, He read a poem titled “The Man Splitting Wood in the Daybreak,” by GalwayKinnell, who died last October. It was a vivid poem of aging and loss, beautifully rendered. McGrath told a story about playing softball against Kinnell when he was a graduate student at Columbia.

Homage was paid to foreign poets, with Fried reading from the works of Cesare Pavese, an Italian writer of the first half of the 20th century, while McGrath read a poem by the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra(who turned 100 last September) in a translation by William Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. “In translation a poem is not exactly what was intended,” Fried said. “But influence comes from a variety of directions.”

Late in the evening the poets turned to their own work with an appropriate modesty. “It’s strange to make claims abut your own poetry when you’ve been reading from such great poets,” McGrath said. But he went on to read a long, terrifically visual poem called “Elvis Presley 1957.” Wade, a leading younger lesbian poet, read a charming work, part of a series, in fact, called “Portrait of Jodi Foster As the First of the Movie Girlfriends.”

Wade, a leading younger lesbian poet, read a charming work, part of a series, in fact, called “Portrait of Jodi Foster As the First of the Movie Girlfriends.”

Guest Blogger, Chauncey Mabe is a seasoned journalist with a 20-year legacy of exemplary literary criticism for South Florida’s Sun Sentinel. This Spring, with funding from The John S. and James L Knight Foundation, The Betsy-South Beach has engaged Mabe in a project to document literary programs from the inside out– sharing the creative viewpoints of wide-ranging writers who connect with Miami’s literary community through residencies in The Betsy’s Writers Room (betsywritersroom.com ) during March, April, and May, 2015.

O, Miami is a poetry festival, with a mission to reach every single person in Miami-Dade County with a poem during the month of April (National Poetry Month). Under The Influence is one of O, Miami’s annual events, held each year at The Betsy Hotel, hosted by MacArthur genius award winner, and Florida poet, Campbell McGrath. (Omiami.org)

February 06, 2015

Kristina Marie Darling: I have always admired the way that your texts exist in spite of, beyond, and against traditional genre categories. Your work has the denseness and lyricism of poetry, with gorgeous and fractured narratives surfacing and resurfacing. In many ways, you question genre boundaries while appropriating the conventions of existing literary genres, a project that's wonderfully ironic and subversive. To what extent do you see genre categories as gendered? Are there larger power structures in the literary community, and in the academy, that dictate genre boundaries? Is writing against them and beyond them a feminist act?

Molly Gaudry: I’m wrapping up my coursework now as a PhD candidate at the University of Utah, where I’ve been spending a lot of time interrogating everything I thought I knew about genre. Is it multi-genre or mixed genre? Are these different from hybrid texts? Or non-genre texts? Do generic boundaries even exist, and, if so, where do they most rigidly appear and why? Is a crossover an invasion, a breach, a misstep, a test? Is it always transgressive? Or is it an attempt to erase, blur, break down walls? To what extent can the common reader learn to accept and appreciate that these boundaries and borderlines are, and have always been, invisible? I am struggling to answer these questions for myself.

I read something interesting recently in an anthropology essay about liminality. “Vermin” was used as a metaphor for boundary crossers. Rats and other critters that sneak into our homes, where they don’t belong, have breached the social contract. They are pests that must be taken care of, must be returned to their place. I’ve been thinking about this a lot with regard to so many invisible boundaries socially constructed around us. The metaphor works for just about any marginalized individual, group, or social structure that attempts to move. I’ve only just begun to wonder about the broad-spectrum potential of what more play in literature might mean, what might come of more widespread generic boundary crossing, because if we can learn to be more willing to allow these shapes and forms to shift and mutate then perhaps we’ll be less rigid in other areas of our lives, too.

I’d like to continue to talk about "feminist acts.” When did you first begin to recognize, in your own work, your feminist investments?

KMD: I definitely agree that writing against genre embodies many forms of resistance, since it is often those in power who delineate genre categories. And it's frightening how these generic categories shape cultural production and the ways that we inhabit language.

I first began to recognize my feminist investments as an M.A. candidate in continental philosophy at the University of Missouri. Many of my colleagues were working within the analytic tradition, and their work drew heavily from logic and the sciences. I was immediately struck by the strict genre conventions that bound their work, and as a result, their thinking, and what was possible within their writing. Research papers always came in preferably five sections, with a clearly worded claim, a tripartite argument, and extensive footnotes. Either that, or the papers didn't make it to conferences, didn't get published, and couldn't be used as writing samples. I admired the mental discipline of these philosophers, but it was difficult not to notice one thing: out of twenty or so students in my year, I was one of two women enrolled in the program. It became cognizant of the fact that one must have access to training, and forms of writing, in order to take part in this particular conversation. And women were frequently denied access to those academic forms of writing, and the training needed to inhabit them with confidence.

In part as a result of my work in philosophy at the University of Missouri, I became interested in rendering these academic forms of writing more inclusive. My work often takes the form of footnotes, appendices, and indices, which are often filled with decidedly non-academic content (including autobiographical writing, aestheticized language, etc.). It seemed problematic to me that these academic forms of writing privilege what have always been hailed as masculine values: logic, rationality, and a scientific mindset. In many ways, my work is a small effort to carve a space for the feminine within academic forms of writing.

MG: I’m really interested in your desire to carve space for the feminine within academic forms of writing. I like to think that my own writing is “feminine,” and I feel that it is (in a Marguerite Durasian kind of way, which is quite complicated and problematic in many ways). Still, I would like to have a better idea of what I actually mean when I say, or feel, that the “feminine” is part of my overall project. I love how you say that you’re claiming the spaces of footnotes, appendices, and indices, and feminizing these constructs. I wonder how you feel about the body of the work, traditionally privileged as the primary space of the text. How important is it to you to claim it for yourself? Or, conversely, to what extent would you want to reject it? What does it mean to you to rethink and reenvision these secondary spaces, like footnotes, which traditionally function to support the primary text, or even tertiary spaces, like appendices and indices?

KMD: That’s a great question. For me, the desire to privilege the body of the work over marginalia reflects many of the implicit hierarchies within language. I’m very interested in what happens when the hierarchies are reversed, when the margins become the main text. In this sense, I suppose I am claiming the main text for myself, but in other ways, I’m trying to redefine what we think of as the main text, to shift the reader’s attention to things that currently only occupy the periphery of their field of vision.

Some readers could certainly see this use of form as a feminist statement about women’s voices being pushed to the margins, but I’m more intrigued by what is possible within those marginal spaces. When the individual subject is (socially and formally) marginalized, they have nothing left to lose, and there is a kind of freedom in that. They are not burdened by the pressures of inhabiting the main text, as they do not have to create a narrative arc, a logical sequence of events, or speak in a way that we recognize as legible. For me, this reversal of main text and marginal text affords the possibility of working outside of accepted ideas about logic, coherence, and narrative structures. It is a subversion of not only hierarchies imposed upon language and various types of cultural texts, but it is a subversion of reason itself. I think this is why I’m so drawn to academic forms of writing. They represent our definitions of logic and legibility, but also the structures of power and authority, and the social inequities, that our ideas about reason give rise to.

With that in mind, I'd love to hear more about the relationship between your life as an academic and your wonderfully experimental work. In what ways do your scholarly interests intersect with your creative work? To what extent do you find your creative work resisting, or reacting against, aspects of academic culture? I'm thinking of the strange genres one must learn and make oneself fit into (like the job letter), as well as the connection (even though we all try to deny it) between these academic genres and structures of power and authority....

MG: I love what you said there about being intrigued by what is possible within marginal spaces and not being burdened by the pressures of inhabiting the main text. There really is a freedom in that, isn’t there?

I’m about to begin my last-ever semester of being a full-time student. I’ll be taking Lance Olsen’s Experimental Forms, and I’ll be sitting in on Melanie Rae Thon’s Narrative Theory and Practice. Both of these professors used the word “liminality” in their syllabus, and between now and the end of the semester I hope to have a much stronger grasp on what this means and how it might be applied to the literature I’m most drawn to as a reader, and how it applies to my own work, which I hesitate to call “experimental.” It’s interesting, actually: before the PhD, I would have used the word “experimental” quite freely, but I’m a lot more cautious with it now. This is a result of Michael Mejia’s fiction workshop, during which I began to wonder to what extent we might generally think of “innovation” as the goal or successful outcome of “experiment” (and perhaps it is the experiment, then, that is our most valuable practice). I’m not sure, though, that I’m ready to call my own work experimental (and if it’s not an experiment, then it’s not by this logic innovative), because although it may look illegible on the page, it still privileges characters’ psychological logic-making abilities, and, as a result, it is concerned with overall legibility and accessibility. In short, I write novels. I inhabit the main text. I work hard to create narrative arcs and characters with deep psychologies. All I am doing is reshaping the novel form, which is nothing new, if we consider the novel’s history to be monstrous and all-devouring, and so to turn to poetic forms that predate novels and recall even older traditions seems in some ways backward-looking as opposed to forward-looking. I don’t know. What do you think?

KMD: I'm fascinated by your definition of the experiment as a text which strives for innovation. So much of the time texts are lauded as experimental when they simply reproduce familiar structures of thinking and writing. But I think that there's more to innovation than just the text. For me, part of innovation is the relationship a text creates between the artist and his or her audience. Many of the books that I consider the most innovative, or the most experimental, imagine the story, or the poem, or the novel as a collaborative endeavor, in which the reader participates actively in the process of creating meaning from the work. This collaborative relationship between reader and writer, text and audience is something that the Lit Pub represents for me (and of course, your novels represent this as well). I think that your work is especially fascinating in that it prompts us to re-imagine the boundaries between text and reader, and between self and other. The text, or the magazine, or the press, represents not just a message or an overarching narrative, but a community. This is innovative, in my opinion, because it privileges process over product, allowing one to exist in a constant state of becoming.

In this respect, I think that we have a lot in common as publishers and cultural producers. I see my small press, Noctuary Press, not as a group of texts, or a project with an overarching message, but rather, as a forum for a dialogue. Noctuary Press is a starting point, a touchstone for conversations about what constitutes genre, the dangers of genre categories, and the gender politics inherent in our definitions of genre. I love being surprised by reviewers' interpretations of Noctuary Press books, as well as creative responses and collaborations that our books have given rise to. Pank Magazine published a wonderful creative engagement with Carol Guess's F IN, a review by J/J Hastain, which is a wonderfully innovative text in its own right. And I'm always happy to hear about our texts being taught in creative writing classes.

With that in mind, I'd love to hear more about your work with the Lit Pub. How did you envision your contribution to the publishing landscape initially? How did this vision change shape after you had started publishing?

MG: I’m interested in what you say about the relationship between writer, text, and audience. I’m thinking of Iser’s field of play, and where we as authors attempt to position readers, from page to page, or even from line to line, particularly with ergodic texts like yours, privileging rhetorical metalepsis, paratext, and even parody (or reclamation) of paratextual spaces. And texts that, in both of our cases, play with readers’ desires to fill in narrative gaps, what’s left untold and unsaid (and where, and why). So even as focalization may not be first and foremost on my creative agenda, it’s definitely there in the process of struggling with the creation of a text that problematizes both overreading and underreading, even as I (think I) privilege voice.

As for Noctuary Press and Lit Pub — actually, let me just jump in here first and further praise j/j hastain as an inspired writer and critic — I see Lit Pub, as you see Noctuary, as a starting point. Where you say Noctuary offers up a starting point for dialogue, I add that Lit Pub is a starting point for authors, a launching pad for careers on the rise, a place for mostly first books to emerge. Previous titles do influence what the catalog has room for in the future, which means I’m always looking for something new, something the catalog doesn’t yet offer. In this way, there is room for dialogues about the texts, but what those conversations may be surprise even me from book to book, author to author.

Actually, this brings up another point I’d like to talk about — you are a powerhouse in terms of your own academic and creative achievements alone, but add to these your literary citizenship, your press’s and authors’ contributions to the contemporary literary scene, and the countless awards, residencies, and fellowships you’ve earned, and I have to ask you a question I’ve often been asked: How do you do it all? And a followup I’m rarely asked: How do you balance your public and personal lives?

KMD: Thank you for your kind words about my work and Noctuary… It definitely means a lot coming from a writer as accomplished as you! I think your questions are great, too, and professionalization is something that definitely doesn’t get talked about enough in graduate school.

I do get asked from time to time how I’m able to go to residencies, publish books, etc., especially at a relatively young age. My answer tends to be very anti-climatic and unpopular. Most graduate students enter an MFA or a PhD program and feel an intense pressure to professionalize once they start the program. But I started sending out work when I was in eighteen years old, and started applying for residencies and fellowships when I was an undergraduate. In retrospect, this was a good thing to do, because once I entered a graduate program, I didn’t have to learn the forms of academic and professional writing (like artist statements, cover letters, and project proposals). I already had application materials ready to go. Now applying for residencies, fellowships, and other opportunities seems manageable, since it’s a fairly familiar process. The practice I had early in my career really helped.

But this doesn’t mean that I’m a good planner, or that I look ahead. I took a poetry workshop when I was an undergraduate at Washington University and it just ran away with me. I loved everything about it and couldn’t wait to be part of the poetry community. I wanted to start reviewing books, going to residencies, and meeting other poets right away. I’m still very engaged in the literary community, and it’s out of sheer love for what I do every day. And how many doctors and stock brokers can say that?

In terms of balancing personal and professional lives, I don’t think the two can really be separated. Many professional opportunities have led to great friendships. For example, I met Carol Guess when I was promoting my book, Melancholia, and now consider her a friend and terrific mentor. I met my friend and collaborator, Max Avi Kaplan, at a residency at Vermont Studio Center (something that I saw as a purely professional opportunity at the time). I really believe that if you love what you do, you will love the people you encounter, so it’s never really been a challenge to balance personal and professional lives. I do wish, though, that I had a few more hours in every day.

While we’re on the subject of literature and community… I’ve always seen you as someone who is an exemplary literary citizen, contributing exciting work while giving back to others and supporting projects you believe in in multiple ways (publishing, promoting, collaborating). How did literary citizenship begin for you? How did you see yourself in relation to a larger community when you began writing, and how did that relationship you envisioned change over time?

MG: That’s a really nice way to look at the intersection between the professional and personal. As for my own literary citizenship, it really came into focus for me in 2008, when I read Blake Butler’s blog post, “Where did Lucy purchase her new vagina?” Overlooking the problematic title, I offer that the post itself is a call to action, a list of to-dos anyone can do. I’m not sure if I was already editing online journals before that post, but I know I felt empowered when I read it, and I always trace my own service back to Blake’s. He served as a model for me, back in 2008, and inspired my own writing and my ideas of why I should be engaged with others’ writing.

And, to answer your question: when I first began writing (as a creative writing major at the School for Creative and Performing Arts, the nation’s only public K-12 school of the arts), I wasn’t even thinking about publication, for instance. Even as I made my way into an undergraduate English major, I was pretty intensely focused on the work (arrogantly so, at that), and I’m not sure I even knew a larger “writing community” existed. I probably had some conception of the “publishing industry” existing solely of Cheever types, and that, if lucky, maybe a young writer would get a story in The New Yorker followed by a Random House book deal. It really wasn’t until after my early interactions with Blake and others in the online community that my perception of what writers, and writing, and publishing could be — truly, an interconnected network of readers and writers of all ages everywhere exemplifying the best attributes of the spirit of from-the-ground-up, community-focused, Internet-enabled grassroots culture-shifting movements.

February 04, 2015

KMD: I've truly enjoyed reading all three of your books, and was intrigued by the dream-like quality of the poems in Arco Iris. They seem at once ethereal and carefully grounded in concrete imagery, rendering everyday things (like coffee, used electronics, and the sky above) suddenly and wonderfully strange. Along these lines, many of the poems take place in an unnamed tropical location, which for the reader, is both anywhere and nowhere, a tangible place place and a psychological one. With that in mind, I'd love to hear your thoughts about the relationship between travel, the literary arts, and the human psyche. What does travel make possible within your writing practice? And within conscious experience?

SV: That's interesting. I don't think of Arco Iris as dreamlike or unspecific. It's actually named a few times as South America-- many regions in South America-- a continent my partner and I traveled for a few months about nine years ago. The book is, in my experience of it and my intentions for it, a kind of anti travel-poetry. Or a rejection of the trope of travel (especially of the white traveler going to a brown place to have a "writing experience" or to buy themselves an authentic transformational experience or etc.). It is a book in which I can't write or think myself out of a scenario in which my movement in the world (as a white American, especially) is not complicit with neoliberal violence and/or globalism and its many layers and types and shades of (economic, racial, political, physical...) violences. I wonder if the ethereal experience you had of it was what I felt to be the spellcasting of capitalism--you try to say something against capitalism, it is immediately appropriated as a product of capitalism (and neutralized?), ad infinitum.

But along those lines, after having read your Music for another life and Vow-- I'd love to ask--what do the ethereal, the dreamlike, the bride, and the book mean for you in those collections? And perhaps related, do you understand or do you think through your work on a book-by-book level, or a poem-by-poem level, or as a group of books together, or...?

KMD: That's a great question. I've always thought of reading as a kind of travel, in which one is carried from consciousness as we know it into a kind of dream state. For me, the physical object of the book facilitates this transformation, this dreaming as much as the work itself.

As much as I hate to admit it, it all begins (for me at least) with the book's cover, as well as its size, texture, the way it feels in the hand. It is for this reason that I love to be very involved in the design of my books. When Max Avi Kaplan and I co-wrote Music for another life, we actually typeset the entire book, designed the cover, and selected the cover image from within the collaboration, presenting it to the publisher as a finished, fully-realized product.

My approach to the book as a physical object emerges, in a lot of ways, from my approach to poetry manuscripts. For me, each manuscript is really one long poem, an entire world unto itself. With both Vow and Music for another life, the book as object was merely an extension of the project, the world I had envisioned within the text itself. I think that we tend to overlook the many ways that poetry is physical, that writing and even publishing are embodied acts.

With that in mind, I'd love to hear more about your process, since your books always read as fully realized, cohesive worlds, the kind I strive for (and at times fall short of creating) in my own work. I'm intrigued by the relationship between the individual poem and the larger manuscript. How do you negotiate the poem and the project, the larger vision? Is it possible to have one without the other? Lastly, how does a given project or manuscript begin for you?

SV: When I was first writing things for the world to see (by which I mean: in my MFA program), I thought on a poem by poem, or even line by line, or word by word level. At this point I think I might feel how you do-- that my books are equivalents of long poems, or, more to the point, are a single word-centered project versus a "collection of poems." I think the word "poetry" is the best thing to call what I am writing these days maybe only because it's not anything else. (Not a story, not an essay, not an article, not straight scholarship, not journalism, not....). I admire that poetry can hold so much, is being asked to hold so much, and that it seems to be easy for it. I am extremely interested in what is often called hybrid or conceptual within the outstandingly elastic abilities of poetry-- these efforts that pose a challenge to the other categories of writing (scholarship, journalism, coding, etc.), asking them to also expand their abilities and considerations and concerns and ways. To democratize, as I believe you said in another interview.

I'd love to hear you speak more about the democratization of writing (scholarly writing about writing), if you're so inclined. I'm also like to know how the instinct to democratize enters your work/career/etc. (Mirzoeff's phrase: "democratizing democracy" is something I've thought a lot about.)

KMD: I love this question. Most of my poems are a (very small) effort to make academic forms of writing more inclusive. Scholarship in the most traditional sense is frequently predicated on acts of exclusion, since most of us can name many things that don't fit within an academic essay: personal experience, aestheticized language, an interrogation of received forms of discourse, experimentation, and the list goes on. In my opinion, many of these things that are excluded from academic writing appear much more often in contemporary women's writing. It is most commonly women's writing that is othered, excluded as non-academic, even irrational. I'm deeply invested in creating a way of using academic forms that is not hostile to women, but rather, allows lived experience, poetic language, and experimentation to compliment and complicate what we think of as rational discourse. In my new book, Fortress, especially, I drew from academic texts like Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, and presented much of the work in footnotes, but my own experience proved central to the discussions of empathy in the book. I think that academic writing is often very personal, whether we like to admit it or not. For me, it's more productive to acknowledge and deal with the ways that different categories of writing, different types of language blur together, rather than trying to maintain a false semblance of clear boundaries.

This interest in democratizing academic writing has shaped most of my career choices, as you suggest in your very perceptive question. I'm active in the small press as a volunteer editor, and have a small press, Noctuary Press. With Noctuary, I try to carve a space for texts that don't fit within the traditional modes of dissemenation, distribution, or even established submission categories. I hope that by publishing uncategorizable texts, I'm playing a small part in expanding what is possible within our thinking about what a text, publisher, or book object can be.

I think that my interest in democratizing academic writing is one of the many reasons I'm so drawn to The End of the Sentimental Journey. It's also beautifully crafted, witty, lively, and engaging. I teach the book in my poetry workshop and my students find it wonderfully refreshing. They often express their surprise that critical writing can be as much fun as poetry, as beautifully written, and as innovative in style. To what extent did you see this creative approach to literary scholarship as a feminist act? How does gender shape the ways that we inhabit academic forms of writing? Is academic writing (and the interrogation of academic forms) linked to larger issues of social justice for you as writer?

SV: I think dismantling anything at all, these days, is my first instinct toward social justice or feminism. I'm also interested in the building--but, cyclical nature of my brain etc.--I've been in dismantle mode for a long time and therefore the dismantling of categories of thought, of writing, of understanding, of power--that is all I seem to want to do. Academic writing is ripe, ripe for implosion and expansion. There is no reason why it shouldn't do more than it does, and do it in more kinds of ways, and there is every reason why it should. Academia, if it is to remain relevant, simply put: needs greater inclusion of women, people of color, queer people, people from different socioeconomic experiences, and people from more parts of the world. This is a longish way of saying that to stay relevant academia needs also to be/think less white, less rich, less male, less heteronormative. Obviously, obviously: what is "academic," what is considered worthy of our study, should be vast and dangerous and offensive, and the language we use to speak about it should not be tamed, not be simply rule-following, and not be simply traditional. If academia can't accommodate this kind of inquiry then it's no longer relevant--just wealthy and self-congratulatory. (Thus, yes, End of the Sentimental Journey-- and everything else I'm reading and working on these days.) This is part of what is interesting to me about the recent wave of creative writing PhD programs-- I have a lot of faith in creative writers' potentials to contaminate academia.

That said, I think journalism and investigative reporting and history, or what we've been calling journalism and investigative reporting and history for a while, are also areas that feel like ours for the taking. Call it documentary, call it political, call it hybrid, call it researched, call it academic-- I've been reading almost exclusively poetry that is engaged with social justice issues of there here and now, and social justice issues as they have resonated historically. And by social justice issues I mean race. I mean gender. I mean capitalism. I mean war machines. I mean oceans dying. I am reading everything I can find in this vein (and there is a lot). Personally, I think these are exciting dismantlings and exciting times for writing (but really bad times for most other things). I can't wait to get old and see all the crazy-good shit this next generation is going to do, but also I don't want to rush it because probably the world is going to end in environmental disaster.

Speaking of which: what crazy-good shit are you working on right now?

KMD: Speaking of feminism, expansion, and social justice... I'm working on a feminist response to/erasure of/reframing of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. The book is a collaboration with visual artist, photographer, and costumer Max Avi Kaplan. The fragmented, elliptical poems in the manuscript recast the narrative from Lo's perspective. As we worked on the book, Max and I also became very interested in themes of disembodiment within Lolita. More often than not, the reader is given only tiny fragments of Lolita, never the full person. We are presented with "a honey colored limb," "knobby knees," a pair of sunglasses. Max's magnificent photographs present their female subject in small fragments, frequently showing her hands trying to escape from rooms, unlocking doors, or dialing a rotary phone. We wanted to call attention to the way Lolita is frequently disembodied, fragmented within the book, but also to empower Lolita, giving voice to a character who is frequently spoken for (in much the same way as Petrarch's Laura). The book, In love with the ghost, is forthcoming from Negative Capability Press in 2015. I hope you'll check it out.

And I'd love to hear about your current projects as well. What can readers look forward to?

SV: I'm working on a few things-- the final revisions of Viability, coming out in 2015 with Penguin; and I've been working on something I imagine will take me years to finish that takes as its center, well, I guess I'm not sure how to talk about it yet-- it's in that long, silently-loud part of becoming something. I'm neck-deep in a few things, I guess. And reading and reading and reading. Researching fetus images in literature and visual art-- so if you know of any....

January 23, 2015

I remember when Charles and Bruce began publishing L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, how their writing made me think of language in a new way. Whether I’m in Australia, or on a reservation in South Dakota, when people say they are talking “in Language,” what I know is that they’re talking in their Mother Tongue. To these folks, English is not Language, English is the way you get along. Language is who you are, words that have been passed down through generations.

“Language Matters” is the first nationwide media recognition of the Language Crisis, which is not just about languages, but cultural diversity. It’s about global homogenization, the Pringleization of society, about cultures being steamrollered under globalization. The growing call to action for language preservation is a drive to see the cultures of the world through a lens of understanding and respect, of seeing the world through a cultural lens, not just a political one. The problem is that in this era of the consciousness of literacy, in this world of hard science, endangered languages and cultures are disadvantaged; if you don’t have the quantification, the metrics, you don’t really have something to say. Quantifying languages is complex (I’d like to say impossible, but I can’t). This is where the poets come in.

Four years ago, when we started “Language Matters,” people were saying there were 7,000 languages in the world. Now there are 6,000, not because we’ve lost that many languages, but because now that these numbers are really starting to count for something on the political table, linguists are beginning to hedge. It’s hard to know exactly how many languages there are, and harder to enumerate speakers. It’s not like counting the number of pandas. In the prologue to the motion poem “Khonsay,” where each line from a different endangered/minority language, we split the difference, say there are 6,500. And the reason I used the “endangered/minority” construct is because linguists also disagree on the at-risk level of many many languages.

When I was in Wales asking people if they spoke Welsh, there were people with a junior high level of vocabulary who were quite proud that they could speak Welsh. Others, who were absolutely fluent, said they couldn’t really speak it. They were hanging out with people who were born into the language, who knew more slang.

The only thing everyone agrees with is that huge numbers of languages, languages that have been around, usually, for millennia, are dying out right now.

When I tell people we’re losing half the languages on the planet by the end of this century, unless we do something about it, they never ask “how many languages is that, exactly?” Instead, their reactions are always “yes, let’s do something about it.” And again, this is why I think that participating in the Language Movement, helping to protect all languages, is part of the job of the poet in 2015. It’s a movement to protect the diversity of languages in the world. A movement to give respect to all languages. A movement to appreciate that each language has its own poetry, and is an important part of an Ecology of Consciousness.

Digital Consciousness connects us all. But are we listening to each other? Are we respecting each other’s traditions? It’s great to have “Language Matters” find its way out into the world, four years after David Grubin and I had that lunch. When I was working on “The United States of Poetry” with Mark Pellington and Joshua Blum, Josh, who gave me a dictum about TV that I’ll never forget. “The first rule of making a television program, is to get it on television.” The national broadcast of “Language Matters on PBS is the end of that quest, of that story.

Which means it’s the beginning of the journey. Now that people have seen the show, what about the call to activism inherent in it? So I ask all you poets out there to live like Natalie Diaz, and help your own Language find its way into the world. And if that Language happens to be English, well then you don’t understand the part about what Language is. Help me get this program into places where languages are struggling to survive and a screening of the film will give cred to the work. Find languages around you and learn from them. Take seriously the role of the poet as a protector of language, not just a user.

There’s nothing like writing a poem, to take words, each one with its own history, multiple meanings, and build a sculpture of meaning. It’s a gift, the words that come to us. People have sparked these sounds, people have laid down their lives for their continuation—language is the essence of humanity, and poetry is the essence of language.

Working with linguists has allowed me to see language from the other side. The collaboration of science and art is good for everybody. If you never could understand the people who come up to you and say they can’t understand poetry, I recommend your going to a linguistics conference and try to understand what those people are talking about!

But to me that’s what the future holds. Sit through a lecture in a language you don’t understand, listen to the poetry of a language you’re trying to learn, place yourself in a situation where English is useless, learn what Language really is. This is the clarion call of our time. This is why Language Matters.

Asking Charlie Mangulda, the Last Speaker of Amurdak, to overdub his performance from the sacred site of Mt. Borradale, was one of the most complex and unnerving directorial moves—to me, not to him—I’ve ever had to do. John Tranter, our local sound guy, is just a dynamite practitioner. But recording Charlie’s voice, two, cracking clapstick players, and a bulbous didgeridoo on a cave’s platform under an ancient painting of a Rainbow Serpent, proved to be too much for our top-of-the-line digital equipment. This poem tells the story. I won’t repeat it. I won’t even tell you what Ma barang! means, I’m sure you already know. And if you don’t know, then you really do already know.

What I do want to talk about, briefly, is the opening lines. In Amurdak, Charlie’s language, is one of the very few instances where you can actually see a difference in consciousnesses between languages. The idea that some languages are more primitive than others is simply cultural prejudice: you can say anything in any language, and every language has a full syntax and grammatology. But in Amurdak, Charlie doesn’t know his left from his right. This concept, which until the 1960s was thought to be universal, actually doesn’t exist in a few languages. The way Charlie designates direction is simply and solely through cardinal directions. And it’s been shown that it doesn’t matter where speakers of these languages are placed, they are automatically oriented to the compass points, so that they can say of the choices, “I’ll take the one on the southwest.”

Now, you could infer from this that Amurdak people don’t see themselves, each one, as the center of the universe, where left and right is always and only consistent to the person speaking. Instead, the Amurdak people—or in this case, Charlie, the Last Speaker—is simply a point standing somewhere on Earth. But that’s just an inference. Or maybe a poem.

One more thing before we close. When Charlie was translating the creation myth of Warramurrungunji, he listed the dozen or so languages that the Goddess dropped, thus bringing humans to the place she had created. Somehow, under the disturbing lights of the camera, with the intrusion of the microphone, Charlie remembered three words of a language that linguist Nick Evans, an expert on cultures of Northern Australia, didn’t know he could speak. And when Charlie mentioned Wurdirrk and gave Nick some words, it was the first time that this language has ever been recorded. That’s correct. I think this was The Apotheosis of the whole shoot of “Language Matters.” I could see the headline in the Times: Documentary Crew Discovers Lost Language.

The words Charlie spoke translate to: “I want to listen to you,” “yam-digging tool,” and “give me fire.” The first thing that was apparent to Nick from these three words is that they are unlike any other language, which means Wurdirrk is not a dialect—without these words, we never would have known that.

As a poet, I’d like to say one more thing about the words. If you triangulate from them, what you have is a whole culture. “I want to listen to you,” the essence of the community. “Yam-digging tool,” the basis of the community’s relationship with the earth and it also means “digging deeply into the meaning of something.” And “give me fire,” the essence of light, of heat, a great song title, and the best joke in the book.

For “gimme fire,” I envisioned Charlie as a little boy, these strange people coming out of the darkness late at night, shivering and cold, needing some of this precious fire for light and heat. Later, Charlie would give me the deeper meaning of this idiom. Hey buddy, you got a match?

The Stomp (Y Stomp, in Welsh), is the National Poetry Slam of Wales. It is part of the annual Eisteddfod, the national cultural festival of all things Welsh. As I say in “Language Matters,” “It’s a lot like the state fairs in the US, except that instead of prizes for pies or pigs, the prizes are for poetry.”

The first Eisteddfod was in 1176, when Lord Rhys invited poets and musicians from all over the country to compete for a seat at his table. You could sing for your supper, and then get fed. Winning was an entree into the house of the Lords, and a golden meal ticket for the winning poet. The chair you pulled up to the table was a special Bard’s Chair, and to this day, the prize for the winning poet in the Formal Category is a Chair. Hand-carved by an artisan, the winner gets to take the Chair home, sit in it, and write more poems. In Welsh.

For me, as usual, the whole thing started at the Bowery Poetry Club, when we hosted readings by Welsh poets as part of the Peoples Poetry Gatherings, 2002-03. That’s where I began to feel the intensity around this ancient Celtic language. Whenever I bring up Welsh in New York, the response is invariably, “Well, what about Irish?” While the Irish fought and gained political independence, they did so in English. The Irish language is now much more endangered than Welsh. The Welsh never fought for independence, but rather cultural parity, and today Welsh is considered the only endangered language to have come off the endangered language list. It’s a success story by any metric, which is why it got its place in “Language Matters.”

One of the poets I met at the Club is Grahame Davies, who writes in both Welsh and English, and whose work and being was crucial in my decision to study Welsh. Grahame lives the fire and rigor needed to keep this ancient language alive. The fire is contagious, and to prepare for the film, I flew to Wales and began my own formal and informal study of the language.

Grahame picked me up at the Caerdydd (Cardiff) Airport, and we headed for breakfast with Elinor Robson of the Welsh Language Society. I confessed my dream to them, and we all laughed over a full Welsh. What? I, who didn’t even know enough to fly to Manchion (Manchester) to get to Gog Gymru (North Wales), who couldn’t say Blaenau Ffestiniog (the slate-mining town where I live in Wales), let alone spell it, who hadn’t even met Dewi Prysor! was proposing that I participate in next year’s Stomp! I, who didn’t know from “hwyl” (aloha), was going to write and perform a poem in Welsh -- all for this documentary I was making for PBS.

And as you now can see on the front page of the live-stream at PBS.org, the fantasy came real, all duded up in lucky Tibetan cap and Mexican guayabera, taking on all comers at Stomp 2012. “Ladies and Gentlemen! My first line of cynghanedd!” I am saying, to translate the first words of this post. And it really was the first cynghanedd I ever wrote.

In the film, the line is followed by a raucous audience response, Stomp cards held high—unlike the U.S. Slam, at the Stomp the audience is the judge, and they judge by holding up different colored cards to indicate their favorite poet. Watch as I collect a brotherly hug from Dewi, my mentor, friend and Stomp opponent, also an award-winning novelist and Stomp-winning poet, whose current job is translating episodes of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” into Welsh.

The cynghanedd is what separates formal Welsh poetry from free verse; in fact, it is what separates Welsh poetry from any other poetry in the world. There are six different forms of cynghanedd, and to win the Chair, you must write a poem that includes sections written in each. Each form has its own rules, here’s a general description the poetic device Marerid Hopwood, in her handbook Singing in Chains: Listening to Welsh Verse, describes as “consonant chime :” to create a cynghanedd , a line is divided into three sections, a double caesura. The middle section is thrown out. The two sections left, must have all their consonants (except the last) match up. In other words, the vowels, and of course in Welsh, Y and W are always vowels, are immaterial. The sounds we use to make rhymes don’t count.

Now from here things get a little complex. Sometimes there is internal rhyme, sometimes rhyme line-to-line, sometimes both—but let’s just leave it at that. The extraordinary thing is that a Welsh audience can hear the cynghanedd, applauding an especially good one, and be quite aware of a poet trying to slide something by. As an American poet writing in Welsh, even in the Stomp, to come up with a cynghanedd was quite a feat.

(Hopwood’s title is of course a line from “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas. The irony is that while we think of Thomas as the Welsh poet, in Wales he’s often not even considered to be in the top tier. Why? Because he didn’t write in Welsh. In fact, many people think that a lot of Thomas’s power comes from his having heard and digested the sounds and rhythms of Welsh poetry as a youth, and then using these Welsh cynghanedd forms in English. For your further elucidation, another poet who used Welsh forms and sounds was that old Jesuit and inventor of sprung rhythm, Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Quick cut back to breakfast—Grahame and Elinor waving goodbye, I’m training/bussing it to Nant Gwrtheyrn, the Welsh Cultural Center, where I will begin my formal study of Welsh. Flashback to Stanza Poetry Festival in St. Andrews, Scotland, six months before, where another Welsh poet, Sian Melangell Dafydd, replies to my comment that I want to learn Welsh by saying “there’s this magical place in Llyn…” Flash forward to Grahame Davies’ brillant Everything Must Change, a novel that is a mash-up of the Welsh language protests of the 60s with the bio of Simone Weill. Flash further forward to my two weeks’ immersion at Nant where my Welsh teacher Llinos Griffin is prodding the Cymraeg (Welsh language) out of me, saying “You, know, you really should meet Dewi Prysor…”

…And what was your first line of cynghanedd, Bob? you’ve probably been wondering. “Yn ysgwd yn fy esgyrn.” Which, as you can see in “Language Matters,” I learn how to pronounce as I drive our van (my full title: host/driver) through scenic Wales, and which the show’s storyteller/line producer, Sian Taifi, also tries to instill in me by having me sing the words.

Besides Sian, Dewi and Grahame, the film also shows me learning with David Crystal, Europe’s most famous linguist, and Ivor ap Glyn, poet and TV host/producer. The line translates, “I am shaking my bones,” and as you can tell by my rendering, I really was.

The Stomp is a variant of the US Poety Slams, and I’ve done enough Slams to know that grabbing attention at the top is crucial. So I asked Dewi to teach me something that would bust through in case anyone at the Stomp should heckle my mispronunciation or lack of mutations, (Mutations! The bete noir of the Welsh language. Did you notice back a-ways how cynghanedd mutated to gynghanedd? Not a typo! In English and French we often elide one word into another by dropping the last letter: singing to singin’, eg. In Welsh, you “mutate” the first letter of the incoming word, so that, for example, if you are going to Bangor, you would say im Mangor, the B of Bangor mutating to an M. Which of course makes driving in Wales even more fun.) So the title I came up with for my Stomp masterpiece is: Ffwciwch Oma! Dwin Ffwcin Dysgwr Ffwcin Gymraeg! which, lovingly translates to “Fuck Off! I’m a Fuckin’ Welsh Fuckin’ Learner!”

Not only would I be trying to turn my lack of Welsh into an advantage by begging for the sympathy vote, but I’d also be paying homage to the colorful language the Stomp is known for, especially as used so expressively by my mate Prysor and the training camp he established in Blaenau (The Queen), with occasional side trips to Llan (Y Pengwyrn) and Tanygrisiau (Y Tap) -- three major pubs in three parts of town. It’s also worth noting that there are no indigenous curse words in Welsh; like Ffwcin, they’re all borrowings from bully English.

Playing between orality and literacy is one of my favorite areas of poetic exploration. In fact, it was how I got involved with Endangered Languages in the first place. Of the 6000 languages in the world (I just love saying that!), only 700 are written down. The Welsh oral traditions, from the Celitc storytellers and Druid poemmakers all he way to today’s Stomp, has been crucial to the language’s survival. And it was through my investigations into the roots of hiphop poetry (hiphop IS poetry!), that I first came across the Language Crisis.

Having established myself as an appropriately iconoclastic bardd Cymreig in the poem’s title, I felt it was important that the first line of the poem reverse field and show my respect for Welsh culture: “Rwy'n teimlo fel y ddraig goch yng nghanol y frwydr,” imparts to me a mythic status, as I identify with the deepest image of Welsh mythology: “I feel like the Red Dragon entering into battle.” You may have noticed that Wales is the only country with a Red Dragon on its flag: the symbol of Wales, sleeping underground next to the White Dragon (England), waiting only for the Apocalypse to disinter, and then emerge victorious in the ensuing battle royale. Wow.

I straighten out this lie in the next line: “Bardd Americanaidd tumffat yng nghanol y Stomp.” “Actually, I’m just a stupid American poet trying to hold me own in the Stomp.” Another secret of Slam success: flip the script! Set up a high image, and then undercut it with your own vulnerability.

The next lines reference my aforementioned debt to hiphop. Hiphop is part of my lineage, too—for a while there in the 80s my tag was the Plain White Rapper. To write this section took painstaking work at the Blaenau llyfrgell (library) with a correlating a rhyming dictionary and a Welsh-English dictionary—why oh why is there no rhyming Welsh-English Dictionary?

Eisiau ymddiheuriad? dim posibiliad...

Eisiau nghyfeiriad? Dyna ddiffiniad o wrthddywediad

A distrywio’r diffiniad!

My address? The definition of randomness

The contradiction of definition!

Definition Demolition!

This also gives a nod to the course I’ve developed at Columbia, “Exploding Text: Poetry Performance,” using extra-literary means to add even more meanings to a poem via collaborations with film, dance, theater, et al.

After this jangly, dirty, provocative opening, I felt it was time for some “real” poetry, and being a “real” poet myself I knew just what lines to use: steal them, from a couple of great poets.

Hen Gychwr Afon Angau, // mae o’n gwbod

Beth ydwyt ti a minnau, frawd

Ond swp o esgyrn mewn gwisg o gnawd

Old River Boatman Death (Rwilliams Parry), he knows it

What art thou and I, brother But in a uniform batch of bones of flesh

I was truly hoping someone in the audience would out me here (I should have had a plant!), so that my next barrage, taking personal blame not only for my plagerism but also for every crime ever committed during the horrific triumph of Capitalism known as US Imperialism would have more resonance:

Dygwyd y llinellau uchod ar eich cyfer oddi ar

R Williams Parry a TH Parry Williams yn enw

Imperialaeth Americanaidd....!

The lines above stolen on your behalf from R Williams Parry & TH Parry Williams in the name of American Imperialism!

This is followed by the lines from “Language Matters.”

Cynghanedd, defended from the orality of the skalds, has been an integral part of Welsh has survived. Hopwood confesses at one point that she believes you can only truly write cynghanedd in the language that evolved in tandem with the poetic form: Cymraeg (Welsh). In essence, her whole lovely how-to is actually nothing but a piece of propaganda for the perpetuation of Welsh.

Cymru, the Welsh word for Wales, means Us, The People. “Wales” is a Saxon word, what the Saxons, the first conquering invaders of Wales, called the Celts there—“The others,” “Those guys over there.” Isn’t it time for the world’s nations to be known by the name that their people call themselves?

It’s true that my relationship with Welsh is a lot like having a lover—you have to give everything and there’s always more and thank goodness it’s never enough. But my head of dreams – in English I wanted this to be my big head, big enough to hold all these languages and the idea that somehow or other that this piece of theater, sacrificing myself on the pyre that is the Stomp, would show my love and respect for Welsh, that I would go to his extreme in order to bring my own personal touch to a documentary that is all about the essence of humanity, which I believe language is, but which can also be talked about in theories and data where it’s possible human contact may be lost.

Of the 12 poets who made it to the National Poetry Slam, Dewi and I were the first two names out of the hat. We went up against each other, splitting our supporters’ votes, and giving the first round to some brilliant whippersnapper poet who had somehow made cynghanedd a mode of conversation—brilliant! As if Byron were crossed with Frank O’Hara, say.

Because we were knocked out in the first round, the crew was able to shoot a wrap-up, right then and there, full of loss that meant nothing, and surrounded by a language that had taught me important truths that would infuse the whole film. And my life.

After the wrap, the crew really wanted to hit the road. I felt bad—for the poet to leave a reading early is bad form, in any language. But it was already late, and our flight back to the States was at 8:00 the next morning, and we had to drive to Llundain, and the Welsh sky was already ablaze. And my big head was full of big dreams but no way sleeping.

January 20, 2015

And so I made my first trip to Hawaii. It’s a long way from everywhere, specks of black lava, folded green jewels in the middle of the largest body of water on the planet – you will now know that, Hawaii is the further from a continent than any other on the planet. No wonder the creation story here, the Kumulipo, begins underwater, with the creation of fish, coral and octopus, and rises up with the spirit of Pele, the Goddess of Fire, a real place—the active volcano in the center of the Big Island. Pele is a real person, too. I met her many-times-Great Granddaughter, Pele Harmann, a teacher at Nawahi, the K-12 immersion school outside Hilo where I spent many a day hearing No English. It’s an honor to be allowed to step inside someone else’s culture. Tread lightly. As Pele said to me, “To you it’s a myth. To me it’s my genealogy.”

This is what you learn. That unlike the rest of the world’s crises, the Language Crisis has a seemingly simple answer: Respect Mother tongues. Let the children born into minority languages live there as much as possible. They will get plenty of the bully language as soon as they walk out the door, as soon as they turn on the TV.

Today there are Hawaiian language immersion schools on every island, but back in the 60s there were none. The number of speakers had shrunk to about 400 with most of them living on the tiny island of Ni’ihau, which was owned (still is) by a single family who allow no non-Hawaiians to set foot there. So the native population lives on in a kind of time capsule of pure Hawaiian. When Larry Kimura, the godfather of the Hawaiian language, and his Hawaiian language students at the University of Hawaii Manao came to the conclusion that just speaking Hawaiian with each other for hours a day was not making the kind of substantive change necessary to keep Hawaiian culture alive, they decided the way forward was to start schools where children would learn Hawaiian the way all children learn languages – by hearing, by mimicking, by conversing. By spending time in a place where the sound environment was always the flowing lilt and glottal stops of Hawaiian. This was the beginning of the punana leo, a language nest. Here children would spend hours daily in a protected place—a nest of Hawaiian. Parents must accompany their little ones (3 months to 5 years ) here, and parents too are bound by the rules. So they end up learning baby Hawaiian, just to keep up with their child. I’m sitting there and a toddler purposefully approaches and starts speaking to me—in Hawaiian. Wants me to read him a book in Hawaiian. I oblige—I may not know all the meanings, but I can read the words, and I’m learning, like he is. But I don’t speak Hawaiian! I’d said to the teacher. Not yet, was her reply.

It was a few kapunas (elders, but like so many Hawaiian words, much more than elders), those remaining from the 400 speakers in 1960, who brought the sounds and traditions of real Hawaiian direct to these students. Auntie Lolena Nichols—I could devote a whole blog to how kinship patterns in orality are as complex as nuclear fission, but right now let’s just say “Auntie”—was one of these native speakers from Ni’ihau. These days she divides her time between the children at the punana leo and graduate students at the University of Hawaii, Manao. In oral consciousness, people are books, and as the language activist/scholar Puakea Nogelmeier is fond of saying, Auntie Lolena is a PhD in living Hawaiian. When I first met Lolena, I presumed a Hawaiian greeting: forehead to forehead, nose to nose, you breathe in the breath of the other. Lolena’s power almost knocked me over.

Nogelmeier, himself is a very special man with a deliciously deep voice. You get to hear it every time you take a bus in Honolulu. Most of the streets still have their original Hawaiian names, but as the language died out so did proper pronunciation. The names became haole, the Hawaiian word for white people, but as the language movement (not Bernstein/Andrews, but the push for mother tongue survival) gained momentum one of the successes was hearing Puakea’s dulcet tones pronounce real Hawaii’an as you take public transportation in Honolulu.

One thing you notice right away in the language is the ‘okina, the glottal stop, considered an actual letter in Hawaiian, one of eight consonants. There are five vowels. Thirteen letters altogether, and one of them is the silent “hitch” you hear when you say uh-oh. Having a language with such a few number of letters, each of which is pronounced in only one way (well, vowels are short and long, but long just means they are longer, not that they have a different sound), gives Hawaiian only 18 phonemes, one of the fewest of any language (English has 57, the Koisan click languages over 140).

It also makes Hawaiian an extremely easy language for speakers to read. Think of the evolution of written English, its centuries of inconsistent spellings and idiosyncratic pronunciations. How different it was for literacy to arrive in Hawaii. When the first missionaries arrived in 1820, they quickly developed a written language and translated the Bible into Hawaiian, the better to convert the populace. They gained the full support of the royal family, who even at this time were considered not the descendants of gods, but actual gods. And when these kings and queens took up the advocacy of reading, it took less than fifty years for Hawaii to surpass the Mainland in literacy, eventually having one of the highest literacy rates in the world. It was said that Hawaiians could read upside-down – because of the lack of reading material, four people would stand around a book or newspaper – two read sideways, one straight on, one upside down.

One of the reasons this happened was the advent of Hawaiian newspapers. Over the next 100 years, more than 100 native language newspapers were founded. But it wasn’t the news they were reporting, it was the incredibly rich Oral culture that they were recording. Every endangered language that is being revived develops techniques for adding vocabulary for new things and concepts (computer, cell pone, defriend, Pringle-ization), and for words that have been lost. But it’s only Hawaii, where the people fell so in love with reading that now researchers can “mine” this trove to find forgotten vocabulary, ideas for new words, and still hear the voices from the days when the language was teeming with energy, the essence of Hawaiian culture full flower.

I want to talk about my visit with William Merwin, who of course lives in Haiku on the island on Maui, telling me that Hawaiian will be back when it is “considered a first language, when you make jokes in it, play around with it.” I want to travel way up the mountain and tell you about my visit with Keali’I Richel,who told me how hula became the way that language survived during the years that the American colonists outlawed it, how “you can have a hula poem without the dance, but you can’t have the dance without the poem.” I want you to meet Kaui sa-Dudoit, the Mother of the Language Movement, whose dozen kids all grew up in immersion schools, all rebelled as teenagers and stopped, and all came back.

And I want you to see David Grubin and me actually getting in the water, up to our knees, daring the Pacific in our bermudas, trying to write a poem while the waves tried to push us over. But instead, it is time to go to Wales, and meet a language that has survived for over a thousand years while the powerful onslaught of bully English ruled the land.

January 19, 2015

Alice Quinn, in all her ebullience, “Bob, this is Eve. Eve Grubin. She’s David Grubin’s daughter! She’s a poet.” This in the sunny, energized Poetry Society of America offices—what a great meeting. Eve was a young poet with a new job. Her dad, a renowned PBS producer/director, had just created “The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets” hosted by Bill Moyers and shot at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. My own PBS series, “The United States of Poetry,” had been broadcast at the same time. There’s so little contact between poetry and television—seemed like David and I were the only people in the universe uniting these two opposites. But plenty of people thought David and I represented two different camps of poetry – academic and street/spoken word. But David had had me be in his film and – oh, this was so marvelously complicated! But it was terrific meeting Evie that day at PSA, thinking of David also as a father, like I was with my daughters. And now we could say hello at parties! Who knew where this might lead?

The story begins The Poem’s new forms in the dawning of the Era of Digital Consciousness. In the beginning, (1980?), I knew television to be the Enemy. TV was why nobody was coming to my readings! They were all at home in front of the Cyclops in the Corner. But then, by luck and friends and a certain proclivity, I had the opportunity to get poetry on television—on WNYC-TV, before Giuliani sold it and it became NY1. For the six years that I produced “Poetry Spots,” television became just another way to transmit the poem. Funny what a little power will do.

I’d learned from Walter Ong that Orality is not a precursor to writing, but a separate and equivalent consciousness. This factoid changed my life. Television became just another platform for poetry to make nothing happen. For tens of thousands of years poetry was solely an oral art. Then came writing, famously followed by print. Now we have digital: film/video/internet. The medium of transmission may change, but the poem is always The Poem.

This interest in Orality is what led me to my fieldwork in Africa, searching for the roots of hip-hop. And I knew that if I were to make this expedition right, led by my guide, mentor and friend, Alhaji Papa Susso, I’d need a couple of cameras and a soundman. Luckily, this kind of realistic insanity is shared by my good buddy, Ram Devineni, who produced these explorations of oral traditions into a three-part series on LinkTV. As soon as we had DVDs of the imaginatively-titled “On the Road with Bob Holman: Africa and Israel,” I immediately sent one to my PBS doppelgänger, David Grubin. It had been 20 years since PBS did poetry.

And so it was that we found ourselves at a pleasant boite on the Bowery, discussing poetry over lunch. David liked “On the Road”! Well, I said, I think of myself as a poet in my documentaries. It was great to talk with a real documentary filmmaker, and heartening that he liked my work. Maybe I got a little nudgey when I asked David if there was anything he could do to help me with this project, and he replied, What do you have in mind? Why don’t we do a project together, I subtly suggested, With you as producer and director? And to my utter astonishment, David replied, Well, let’s see if we can get the money.

It may sound like a line out of Hollywood, but I didn’t notice. If anyone knows the production of an educational documentary from soup to nuts it’s David Grubin and his a fistful of Emmys. He said he’d try the National Endowment for the Humanities first, they had funded him in the past. When I went to the NEH website to check out the grant form, I couldn’t believe that their application model was for “The Buddha,” Grubin’s award-winning documentary. (“The Buddha”, by the way, has over 700,000 likes on Facebook now). This might happen!

And it did.

Here’s our secret. David is totally committed to poetry, as is his wife, the artist Joan Grubin. They read poems to each other every morning, and David’s memorized quite a number. He and I have a great time talking over everyone from Stanley Kunitz to Sekou Sundiata, and the synthesis of our sensibilities—I still remember the way that I was attacked by some people from the Dodge Foundation, “You can’t make a poetry film in MTV bursts, with no narrator!”—was really played out in our quest to use poetry as the engine to bring the world’s attention to the language crisis—half the languages on the planet will disappear this century.

I suggested we make the film in Africa, where Orality is a way of life. Africa is where poets, griots, have a real role in society—and they get paid, too. We could start off in the Kalahari, I said, and listen to Koisan, the “click” languages—they have over 140 phonemes (sounds), the most in the world. Listening to a Koisan speaker is like listening to a jug band in the mouth. And of course there’s the incredible griot traditions of West Africa, where I had previously spent so much time learning, straight from the origins, of African American musical traditions, the birthplace of the blues, jazz, hip-hop. David listened. We need an argument,” he said. We need to tell the story of how languages become endangered, and why that’s important. What do we lose when we lose a language?

Finally, after a lot of nudging on his part, I got it. How about we have a language that’s dying, say, a last speaker. and a language in the struggle of revivification, and close with a success story, actually the only success story (outside of the special case that is Hebrew) -- Welsh, the only language to have come of the endangered list.

And that was it. That’s what we did, and that’s how Language Matters came to be. The money came through from the National Endowment for the Humanities (thank you so, NEH!) and also some from (LINK) Pacific Islanders in Communication (mahalo!). The show will be broadcast this week in most parts of the US, but you’ll have to check your own listings to find out exactly when, and in some places, like Minneapolis, it won’t broadcast until April. Please check with your local stations. My sister Amy lobbied the affiliate in Richmond, VA, and now we’ll be seen there. Thanks, Amy.

One little anecdote for the road. We knew we had to have Wales, and when we met linguist Nick Evans we saw the camera-ready qualities of North Arnhemland, Australia. But for the “language in transition section,” I really thought we should head to Greenland, where some linguists are working in tandem with the population, leading the writing of poems in Greenlandic about walrus hunting and seal fat while actually engaging in the hunts—what could be better?

But Bob, David replied, W.S. Merwin is in Hawaii. He’s studied the language, and planted endangered species of palms that would make a great physical analogy. And the story of the punana leo, the language nests where children speak only Hawaiian…I just stared at him. Ok Bob, David said. You go buy the parkas. I’ll get the bikinis.

December 18, 2014

I have heard about Kazakh hospitality, but am not prepared for this: this is no ordinary hotel, this is a palace. The Golden Palace.

And I’ve got a deluxe room. It’s huge. Huge floor to ceiling windows on two sides with a view of the orthodox church in the distance.

Feels great to have a big bed and couch in the room.

In the elevator, I see this:

I have never seen an ad quite like this.

We can learn a great deal about different cultures from their advertisements.

How would you describe the expression on this man’s face?

If there were a comic bubble emerging from his mouth, what would you write in it?

“Welcome to our business lunch. You got a problem?”

“Hello. If you don’t like our business lunch, I will smash it in your face.”

“Which of you schmucks had the meat?”

I have dined with many eminent figures and great leaders, but never imagined I would have a chance to eat breakfast—my first breakfast in Kazakhstan—with Marcus Aurelius. Can you believe it? I was supposed to have time for a nap, but after striking up a conversation at breakfast (love the crepes, cucumbers and eggs)with Marcus Aurelius (who could pass that up?), taking a shower and getting organizized, it is already time to go to lunch.

Kazakh people like to sit around and talk and drink tea (black tea with milk) the way people in other countries like to sit around and talk and drink beer.

After lunch, Zhanar helps me find a winter coat. I try on about twelve coats, all black. Finally find this proletariat number, the biggest they have. All the inexplicable buckles, straps, zippers and pockets (for ammunition?) remind me of the Explorer’s coat in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony. But it’s warm, functional and can’t argue with the Soviet-era price.

Need winter shoes. I have to walk very slowly, stepping gingerly so as to not slip on ice. And the cold goes right through my Adidas.

Zhanar takes me to meet the Vice-Rector, and Sholpan (first thought “Chopin”), another graduate student instructor, who will be my translator and assistant.

They are both very welcoming and friendly. Serving often as the interpreter of late, it is interesting to be on the other end of the translation. I am being welcomed, and told what is expected of me, what I need to do. Some things I am being asked, but I it is clear that I am being told. I notice part way through the translation that there is no space for me to respond. I try to create some space, then realize it is meant to be that way. Near the end, I squeeze in a “thank you,” and the Vice-Rector nods and smiles.

“There will be a panel discussion at 3 pm. We would like you to be on the panel with the other foreign professor and two professors from our university. Is that ok?”

“Yes.”

I am wondering what the panel discussion will be on.

I didn’t prepare anything, but am too tired to think about it.

I’ll be there, just be on the panel. Listen.

On the way over, I ask Sholpan:

“What will the panel discussion be on?”

“English Literature and English Education.”

“Ah, ok. Is there anything I should talk about?”

“You can just talk about what you do. And they will ask you questions.”

This puts me at ease.

“Lately, our students have some lack of interest in literature. So if you can talk about

what you do in English Literature in some exciting way, that lets them know the field

is still an active one these days, that would stimulate their interest, that would be good.”

Now I know what to talk about.

When we get to the library/lecture room, the Italian professor is handing out certificates. This is her last day. She receives a resounding round of applause. I wonder what it will be like on my last day.

The two Kazakh professors join us, and the panel begins.

Soon comes the question about what we do in literature, why we chose to major in it in college, and what excites us about it now, as professors.

After the Italian professor answers, it is my turn.

“My major in college was not literature, but philosophy. When I thought of literature back then, I thought of works by Shakespeare and Charles Dickens—of course, they are wonderful. But now that this is not all of what literature is about. Literature is also here and now. For example, through interviews, we can elicit and transcribe the life stories of those around us, and give voices to the unheard and unspoken. This too is a rich field for the production of literature.”

I feel the silence in the room increase, and realize I said “Shakespeare and Charles Dickens” with a tone of denigration. Here I am, first day in Kazakhstan, bashing Shakespeare and Dickens! How odd. This was my attempt to raise interest in the contemporary at the expense of the canonical. And my quick addition of “wonderful” was an attempt to revise that once I felt the reaction.

Sure enough, as the panel progresses, I realize that the focus of the Italian professor’s week-long lectures was Romeo & Juliet.

Last year, when Marilynne Robinson visited Seoul, I asked her if she had read any recent novels she could recommend. She responded that she was so immersed in Shakespeare, she could not.

As the discussion moves on, one student asks the Italian professor if in fact Romeo & Juliet might be more suitable for Italian audiences than Kazakh ones, as it is set in Italy. The Italian professor responds sensibly that this is not the case, explaining why. She states how Romeo & Juliet can be read through multiple cultures, and how it has been and continues to be reinterpreted in new and illuminating ways throughout the world. This makes me think of Kenneth Koch’s avant-garde renditions ofHamlet, and when it is my turn to speak, I suggest that the student read them.

Another student asks what we know about Kazakh and Russian literature. I confess that I know nothing about Kazakh literature, and very little about Russian, and hope they will teach me about both. But there are three things that pertain to Russian literature I often think about:

When the famous American novelist William Faulkner was asked to name the three greatest novels ever written, he replied: “Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina.”

Chekov once said, “if there is a gun on the wall in act one, it must be fired by act three.”

When I was in college, my teacher praised Osip Mandelstam and suggested I read his work. I went to the library and read his poems. I kept reading the poems and turning the pages. I read on, but could not find any poems I liked. When I met my teacher, he asked if I had read Mandelstam. I said I did, but what was the big deal? I didn’t find any poems I liked. “Oh, you must read his prose!” I went back to the library and found his prose—a big dusty book no one had checked out for twenty years. I read and read. This was amazing. The most inspiring work I read in all four years of college. Especially Journey to Armenia. And his scathing criticism of Jack London. After some time, I realized that the problem with Mandelstam’s poetry was not that it was not good, but that it probably was not well-translated, whereas his prose was.

I think I am winning the audience back over, making up for my Shakespeare/Dickens faux pas with the Tolstoy anecdote. And everyone in the room knows the Chekov reference—they are finishing the line about the gun on the wall before I can.

But when I mention Mandelstam’s criticism of Jack London, the Kazakh professor to my right perks up.

Built in the 1930s, then rebuilt in after independence, the combination of that Soviet larger-than-human scale and all-too-human Central Asian designs makes for an incredible fusion.

As I look up through the high ceilings, I make a comment about the daytime night sky.

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.

I am wondering what ballets are on.

Turns out we will see two in a row—Othello and Carmen.

The curse of Shakespeare!

How’s that for a double feature?

As we recline in our balcony seats, the theatre darkens. It is so warm and comfortable.

So tired, as the ballerinas and -rinos stretch their lithe bodies through the music over the stage, I whisper apologies and fall asleep—dreaming and waking intermittently for the entirety of Othello.

Deeply relaxed, pondering the admixture of Othello and dreams I had while sleeping through it, I realize I’ve insulted Shakespeare twice in one day.

Erica and James—two professors from Italy and Bulgaria—laugh and ask me how I liked it.

“You will not be able to sleep during Carmen,” says the Italian professor.

She is right. Thanks to the score, some gum, my colleagues, and the masterful dancers, I get a second wind, and think a lot about The Bad News Bears.

After the ballet, we are escorted to dinner at Tubeteika for a traditional Kazakh and Uzbek dinner. Tubeteika is the word for the traditional Uzbek cap worn by this figure:

There’s live music and a dance floor. Jet lag subsides. I’m excited to partake of the local fare.

When I see “camel milk” and “horse milk” on the drink menu, I turn to James (Bulgaria) on my left and joke about ordering some. A few minutes later, the drinks arrive. Our host points at the bowls of cloudy liquid and says, “This is camel’s milk. And horse milk.”

James drinks first. Judging from his reaction, the horse milk is hard to handle.

I hesitate, then take a sip.

It’s a bucking bronco. Extremely sour and fatty. Like a powerful liquid yogurt, but not that bad.

After this, the camel milk should be easy.

I’m looking forward to drinking the camel’s milk, and take a sip.

What… is this? Something is wrong.

I realize I drank the camel’s milk first.

Horse milk is crazy: it tastes like electricity. And burning.

Very strong, smoky flavor. I take another sip of camel milk to bring me back to earth.

“You know, you can get drunk on horse milk.”

“Really?

“Yes—it is fermented.”

Before coming to Kazakhstan, I did some research, and found that the most common dishes contain horsemeat, lamb, and beef, in that order. The guest of honor is usually offered the lamb’s eyeball.

I love lamb and beef, but decided I would abstain from horse… and eyeballs.

However, our host ordered several horse dishes, including the national Kazakh dish, besbarmak.

This is horsemeat over wide, long noodles.

I decide to go for it, and enjoy it—especially the noodles.

The highlight of the meal, however—after being on the road, where it’s often hard to find fresh vegetables—is this “Vegetable Plate”: tomatoes, cucumbers and bell peppers heaped with fresh dill and parsley.

December 05, 2014

With every book I read, a veritable film is created within. Pupils retract and widen; my fingers can’t move rapidly enough through pages as I see these words and somewhere inside me, images of this reality are created and the film reel of the book progresses. The most internal movie is being made as I imagine what these words really mean. Everything is there. I can see each character; I try to sense idiosyncrasies within them; I conjure up the places they live; there’s an attempt to see everything, and often, I’m imagining it. That’s ok. But what if I didn’t have to? A thirst for reading combined with a primal love for adventure and travel sparked a passion for going to those places I’ve read about in books and experiencing a tangible film reel--something I can touch and don’t have to dream up within my imagination.

Brazenly colored buildings line the streets

Pretty psyched to be in Ireland

The best place I’ve ever seen is Ireland. But I knew that before I visited. My father trekked through the country years ago; he brought back a bodhran, a necklace he’d been given by someone who picked him up while hitchhiking, and a map of the country. I’d traced the lines of the map hanging on my father’s wall so many times, but I’d also read Angela’s Ashes. Frank McCourt’s brutal accounts of poverty and hardship in 1930’s/1940’s Limerick didn’t necessarily stir in me a desire to glorify or relish in the grit of the city. It did, however, have me wondering what it might be like to retrace McCourt’s steps. For those not familiar with the book, Frank McCourt recounts his impoverished childhood as he moves from Brooklyn to Limerick and details all the trials that came with it.

The Location of Leamy’s National School, Now Called Leamy House

I came to Limerick not needing to see McCourt’s Limerick necessarily, but to create my own, and to assimilate it into a more personal Angela’s Ashes. McCourt describes Leamy’s National School, for example, as a seemingly gray place where teachers doled out corporate punishment and students were warned not to cry. Today, the mid-sized brick building still stands, and it seems implausible that this--this spot where you lean and rest your back on the cool iron gates and finger the short stone columns that stand before the building--this is where Frank McCourt saw the things that made him who he was and subsequently earned him a Pulitzer. I stand where he stood.

The Current Storefront of South’s Bar

Much of McCourt’s Limerick has been glorified so, and what was once poverty stricken have subsequently become museums, luxury hotels, and other signs of booming industry. There’s even an Angela’s Ashes walking tour. Not everything still stands, but some things do. South’s Pub does. It’s the pub that serves as a vehicle for McCourt’s father to drink up the family’s savings in the book. It’s also the place where McCourt’s uncle bought him his first pint. The brightly colored bar glass of the Tiffany lamps and lavishly upholstered furniture may not reflect the more bleakly narrated description of the bar in the novel, but that’s not the point. It’s there. I was there. And you can go there. We can all be somehow a part of rewriting our favorite novels in our own mind’s eye by seeing and touching and smelling what our authors did when those words were written. We can make our own reel, and then our favorite novels become something else. They become ours.

November 20, 2014

In Jinan, as previously in Dalian, we can post, but we cannot read the blog, nor can we make comments -- so let me take a moment to express our sympathy for you, Jim, on the loss of your father, and our appreciation of your poem. You're in our thoughts, good friend.

On Monday the 19th, lecturing on American poetry to a room of over 100 college juniors majoring in foreign languages, I read my fifty-line "Oxford Cento," all lines culled from "The Oxford Book of America Poetry." I asked the students to write down their favorite line and make it the opening line of a poem of their own. Near the end of the lecture a student stood up and told us her name in Chinese, then added that her "Western name" is Daisy. (Evidently, the Chinese choose their own Western forenames, which need have no relation to their Chinese names.) Daisy, who announced that Rabindranath Tagore has influenced her, recited the poem she had just written beginning with Poe's line from "Annabel Lee": "and the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes." The poem was about the Sichuan earthquake. "If you shed tears for the stars, you won't see the sun," she wrote. Her poem concluided, "and the sun also rises."

At this point a young man challenged me to write a one-line prose poem on the spot about my visit to the university. Luckily I had been reading Whitman. I said, "At your university I see a sea of faces and in the sea of faces I see the face of God." Appreciation was expressed with a collective murmuring sigh. The students liked two-line poems I read by Pound, Charles Reznikoff ("The Old Man"), J.V. Cunningham ("An Epitaph for Anyone"), Dryden, Dorothy Parker ("News Item"), A. R. Ammons ("Their Sex Life"), and Ogden Nash.

Someone asked for my opinion of Edgar Allan Poe. Just as at West Point, I encountered a strong, genuine, populist love of Poe that countered the received negative judgment that has dogged the writer from the start. The fact that Poe's name is identical with the first three letters of "poetry" seemed to clinch the case.

November 19, 2014

Here’s a story about how imagination and history get mixed up. Jamali was a 16th century Sufi court poet who lived in Delhi. According to Delhi’s oral tradition, he had a male lover named Kamali, although no-one knows who Kamali was. For nearly 500 years, this story has traveled down from generation to generation.

I stumbled upon these characters while I was in Delhi for a writing residency. One week after I had arrived, the residents were told that later that day, we would have a chance to visit the newly restored Jamali Kamali Mosque and Tomb.

Our bus arrived at an overgrown park entrance. We traipsed alongside a river full of plastic trash, climbed through hills of brush, climbed over unrestored ruins and arrived on top of a hill where the Jamali Kamali Mosque and Tomb stood. A brand new sign at its entrance informed visitors that the Tomb held the remains of Jamali, a 16th century Sufi Court Poet and Kamali, whose identity, the sign said, was unknown.

The small tomb’s intimacy was stunning. Looking at the two white marble graves, the conservator of the restoration explained who Jamali was, then said, “It is believed, through oral tradition, that Kamali was his homosexual lover.” “What?” I blurted out, “But….the new sign out front says his identity was unknown.”

Jarred by that fractured moment, when I returned to my Delhi desk, I began to write as if I were Jamali speaking to Kamali. The sound of their imaginary voices propelled me forward. I had neither plan, nor goal. Seeing the beauty of their graves, hearing the tale that had been passed down, spurred me on to invent a story of love, sex, separation and death. It is not based on any historical record – there isn’t one.

I went back to India in 2011 to celebrate the book’s publication bringing Jamali-Kamali to the Jaipur Literary Festival. Bipin Shah, of Mapin Publishing, arranged the Delhi book launch. To our amazement, the moderator scolded me. How dare I take on these historical figures and record my imaginings? The audience argued like a bunch of eloquent, intense debaters. I argued my case for the imagination, then read. Jamali and Kamali’s voices filled the room. Later that night, I remembered Salman Rushdie’s words: A poet’s work is to name the unnameable…to shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

One day, months later, I looked up my Jamali-Kamali book title to see what was happening with it. I ended up on an Indian website, a travel portal to Delhi. I was reading about the historical monument, the Jamali Kamali Mosque and Tomb - which subway to take for your visit – opens at sunrise - closes at sunset - Thai restaurant nearby. Then I was shocked to read:

Jamali Kamali offers a fine piece of structural design and a fascinating story behind it.

Forlorn Love

After his death in 1535, Jamali was buried in his tomb alongside Kamali. Very few are aware that both these men were deeply in love with each other. In Jamali’s poetic works you can find passionate words and phrases describing his immense love for Kamali such as “On the map of your body, there is nowhere I would not travel.”

The “fascinating story” behind the monument is a fiction! It comes from my imagined poem, not from historical facts. Jamali did not write the line quoted above. I did.

The webpage relates a few details about Jamali’s life as if they are facts, but the details are taken from the invented poem. The website suggests reading my book, Jamali-Kamali: A Tale of Passion in Mughal India, to those interested in more of the men’s histories.

As Rushdie wrote Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts. And Jamali and Kamali, thanks to one website’s misrepresentation, move deeper into the Indian story -- history coming alive through art.

November 18, 2014

When I smelled a gardenia, I thought I wish you could smell this. Then, while looking at light on the wide face of a sunflower, I thought I wish you could see this right now. The sun moved within a couple of minutes and the alive light was gone, so right now mattered. Showing sensual urgency spurs me to write sometimes.

fortune you will heave me for, forher dark hair and her moonlit-teeth. You will love her well in-to three-or-four cities, and then, you will slowly

sink. Reader, I will never forgive you, but not, poor cock-sure Reader, not, for what you think. O, Reader Sweet! and Reader Strange! Reader Deaf and Reader

When I first met Olena, she was at the MacDowell Colony sitting in an Adirondack chair with a hefty stack of books on the chair arm. When I asked her if she was going to read all those books, she said ”Yes! I read to write.”

November 16, 2014

Hi Everyone, thanks for tuning in and thanks Stacey for having me on board. For the next few days I’ll be writing in one way or another about words/sounds and history/imagination.

I’ll start with my personal story about the messiness between fact and fiction. As a tiny girl, my mother took me on the train from the suburbs of New York into the city where I took painting lessons in the basement of the Metropolitan Museum. I loved to paint pictures in my head.

When I was ten years old, polio struck. I was shocked to be immobilized, first by the deadening effect of polio and later by an enormous body cast. As my body was losing motion, my mind was painting. I remember lying inert in my hospital bed, focused on the dots of the hospital ceiling tiles. I pretended they were all kinds of animals on the move - bears, camels, foxes on parade.

With the help of my pal, my imagination, I joked around on the hospital ward, making life not only bearable but fun. Looking monster-like in my full-length body cast, I wrote a letter to the Barbizon School of Modeling, asking whether I could become a model. Here’s their dead-serious response:

Although my illness made for a rich mental life, no amount of pretending could alleviate my actual physical confinement. Had I focused on that rather than letting my mind wander free, I can’t imagine how miserable I would have been. In fact, during those strenuously hard years, I felt very alive. Better a life without such obstacles, but for me, immobility shaped my vision.

After polio, I valued my mind’s flexibility like gold. Eventually, the poetry and prose I wrote relied on imagination.

Now, after many decades, I’ve written my true story, a memoir of all things, in which not all is true. I’ve made some things up, like an earthquake that hit our town. Even with clues that the incident is metaphorical, my sister called and said, “I didn’t know there was an earthquake in Larchmont!”

There’s a new turn on the fact/fiction front for me. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a major character in Polio Boulevard, has emerged in a new project focused solely on him. In these pages, I am driven to have every word factually correct. A first! Nothing made up as far as that’s possible -- a new universe.

Three years after FDR was stricken with polio at 39, he bought a houseboat with a friend and named it the Larooco. This was after he was assistant secretary of the Navy but before he was Governor of New York and long before he was President of the United States.

From 1924-26, he spent a few months each winter in the Florida Keys on the boat. It was the most withdrawn-from- the-world period of his life. While there, Roosevelt kept a nautical log, writing longhand each day about fish caught, weather, the boat’s route, engine trouble, meals, and guests.

Here’s how the Larooco Log begins:

Saturday, February 2, 1924

At Jacksonville, Florida, FDR went on board and put Larooco in commission. Sailing-master Robert S. Morris and Mrs. Morris spent the day getting provisions, and the trunks, etc. were duly unpacked, fishing gear stowed and Library of World’s Worst Literature placed on shelves.

November 07, 2014

I lived in San Sebastian, Spain for a year as an undergraduate and enjoyed getting to know another culture well enough that it began to open my mind to a different way of thinking. I have been studying French for the past year and a half with the goal of becoming a qualified French speaker on the San Francisco to Paris route so I can work that route more regularly. Our layover there is two days. While I plan to continue allowing all the cultures I encounter to influence my writing, I look forward to choosing one at this point to really study and embrace.

In Paris it feels like it’s still worthwhile to pursue the fine arts. I could walk around the gardens every day and be inspired by the dark genius of Rodin’s statues. I love the twisted fits of brilliance jutting out of The Gates of Hell. I visited Père Lachaise Cemetery in September. To have the towering trees shedding their autumn leaves and hear the voices of children coming over the hill as I meandered the final resting places of some of my favorite people was enchanting.

I have of course been (re)reading French poets and novelists as I study the language and culture. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry has become very dear to me. He was an airline pilot. In his memoir Wind, Sand,and Stars, he speaks of many aspects of the airline profession and this “new breed of men” that ring true to me. The rich paradise of camaraderie alternating with isolation. Sometimes you have a wonderful crew to go out with and sometimes you’re alone in a hotel room or a strange place or even back at home where everyone else is participating in a Monday through Friday work routine that you aren’t part of, you don’t even feel on their time zone. When you understand that, you can understand why airline crews feel a strong familial bond with each other. Some of the greatest treasures one encounters exploring are the people you meet.

“Thus is the earth at once a desert and a paradise, rich in secret hidden gardens, gardens inaccessible, but to which the craft leads us ever back, one day or another. Life may scatter us and keep us apart; it may prevent us from thinking very often of one another; but we know that our comrades are somewhere ‘out there’-where, one can hardly say-silent, forgotten, but deeply faithful. And when our path crosses theirs, they greet us with such manifest joy, shake us so gaily by the shoulders! Indeed we are accustomed to waiting.” -Antoine de Saint de Saint-Exupéry

On occasion, Antoine would circle an airport for forty extra minutes before landing so he could finish reading a novel or working on his writing, much to the chagrin of the tower and ground staff.

I would like to thank Best American Poetry for allowing me to be their Guest Author this week. It has forced me to look at my career and writing, and I hope at least a few people were mildly entertained. Merci!

November 05, 2014

The attacks of September 11th were very difficult for me as they were for many people. It was the last year of my MFA program. In addition to teaching and flying, I was finishing my thesis which was a book length collection of poetry about a flight attendant named Kimberlie.

I was surprised some flight attendants were able to work right away. I was afraid there were going to be more attacks. I took an unpaid week off which the airline allowed us to do without a problem. After a week, I had to go back to work. I was scared and grieving but broke. In the briefing I had with the two other flight attendants prior to our trip, I told them I was scared and it was my first trip back. One of the other young women said, “I’m scared too, it’s my first trip too. My mom is coming on all our flights with us.” Her mom could pass ride space available for free as part of our employee benefits and it wasn’t a problem getting on any of the flights because they were all practically empty. In spite of what anyone may think, I fully admit I was so glad to have a mom there watching over us. The other young woman working with us didn’t seem frightened at all. Her husband was a high school history teacher and the attacks caused him to change his entire course to 9/11 backstory. For the first time in his teaching career, his students were enthralled.

Of course, flying and finishing assignments and my thesis, 9/11 entered the poems. The fear I felt. The images I saw. Very shortly after 9/11, I went to the Hong Kong Ladies’ Night Market where a vendor was selling t-shirts with screened images of the Twin Towers burning right before they collapsed. The shirts were hanging outside his booth, high on display. He saw me looking at them with shock and disgust and he looked at me indignantly as if to say, “That’s right.”

I had scheduled for Eileen Tabios to be the Guest Author in the class I was teaching. She spoke to the class about the difficulty of finding language immediately after a tragedy occurs. Grappling with language myself, all I could see was the image of the dust settling and feel a sense of quiet dislocation. Images without sound. It became the final poem of the collection.

November 03, 2014

We stopped for a night in Bishop, California on our way back from backpacking in the Sierras. There were a handful of chain hotels to choose from-La Quinta, Best Western-and a few local motels. We decided it would be more fun to stay at a local place.

The woman who worked the front desk lived in the unit behind it. Late thirties and 8 months pregnant, she came in behind us carrying a stack of sheets.

“You want a room?”

“Do you have one with a king size bed?”

“I guess.”

We drove ten feet from the office to park in front of our room, Number 6, our car nearly touching the room door.

Our neighbor came out of Number 5 as we got out of the car. He lit a cigarette and cracked open his tall, silver can of Coors Light. It was 10:45 am. A woman could be heard yelling at him from inside the room. He shut the door cutting her off and sat down on the plastic chair inhaling.

Our room had wood paneling and a faded painting of a flower. The long door stopper boinged when I flicked it with my toe. Off the bedroom there was a yellow kitchenette.

Through the wall, I could hear the muffled voice of the woman still yelling at the man. Everything about the motel seemed as if a fantastic, awful scene that would be written by Sam Shepard and reenacted by Kim Basinger was about to happen. It was far from luxury, but I loved it, as I love encountering all kinds of different places.

When I was growing up, I romanticized the life of Mark Twain. I thought, “What an exciting life to work on a ship so you can explore the world and write. Maybe I can do that one day.” And that’s what I do. I support myself as a flight attendant as I explore both domestically and internationally and work on my writing in hotels, at parks and cafes, and at home.

I’m very grateful to Best American Poetry for allowing me the opportunity to be their Guest Author, and of course to Terrance Hayes who selected my poem for Best American Poetry’s current issue which brought this all together. While I can write about anything I choose, it was suggested one thing I may want to consider is the way in which my profession has shaped my writing. I’m looking forward to considering that over the next few days.